Statelessness can be produced en masse by denationalization of or refusal to grant citizenship to certain groups for reasons of race, ethnicity or otherwise. There are also cases of statelessness caused by insufficient administrative support for acquiring citizenship under restrictive regulations. Furthermore, transfer of territory resulting from state dissolution, succession, or independence produces stateless persons in residents of that territory. Succeeding states redefining citizenship requirements can produce a large number of stateless persons. Insufficient concern for the stateless before succession can invite this situation to linger unresolved. As mentioned earlier, the distinction between de jure and de facto statelessness can at times become vague. Discriminatory attitudes of government officials in charge of registration procedures, lack of parents’ identification documents, and lack of knowledge or understanding of the relevant nationality laws and regulations in both registration officials and parents can often hamper recognition of nationality at birth. Hospital staff may refuse to issue a birth certificate, while many irregular migrants hesitate to register their newborn for fear of drawing government attention to their immigration status. Jus soli countries sometimes require registration at embassies and consulates to acquire nationality. In this case, failure to do so deprives the subject of her/his legal nationality.23 (3) Consequences of Statelessness: An Interface of Nationality and Immigration Laws Hannah Arendt describes in The Origins of Totalitarianism, “the moment human beings lacked their own government and had to fall back on their minimum rights, no authority was left to protect them and no institution was willing to guarantee them. [What was] supposedly inalienable, proved to be unenforceable.”24 International human rights law bears an institutional memory of the plight of the Jews whose nationalities were confiscated as they vanished from sight during the holocaust. The condition of human rights around the globe has seen a change in the past 60 years, an outcome at least partly due to development in international human rights law. Arendt’s understanding half a century ago therefore may not altogether apply today, but by and large her coherent observations still holds true in the contemporary world. A 23 Yasuhiro Okuda, Suji de miru kodomo no kokuseki to zairyu shikaku (Nationality and Residence Status of the Child: Statistical Analysis) (2002), pp.38-39. 24 Arendt, H., The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), pp.291-93.; Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), p.240. 13